1. Field
Example aspects of the present invention generally relate to communication systems and more particularly to products for providing a query and launch tool for communications system.
2. Related Art
A turret system is a specialized key telephony switching system that allows a relatively small number of users to access a large number of external lines and provides enhanced communication features such as hoot-n-holler, push-to-talk, intercom, video, and large-scale conferencing. These features are often utilized in the financial industry such as trading floor environments, as well as security/law enforcement, public safety utilities, healthcare, and customer support (e.g., contact centers) environments.
Users interface with a turret system through a turret device, which is a phone-like desktop device with multiple handsets and speakers and multiple buttons. A turret is either implemented in dedicated hardware (sometimes referred to as a “hard” turret) or a general-purpose computer (sometimes referred to as a “soft” turret).
Turret devices can reside in a fixed environment of dedicated voice communications trading resources or a more virtualized trading environment across multiple sites. A virtual environment allows resources to be shared dynamically, when and where required, across a global corporate enterprise.
Typical global corporate enterprises lack mechanisms for querying, sharing and organizing information related to communications resources and infrastructure. Search engines, for example, are not designed to identify and organize resources across a communications system. A search engine searches for information on a network and presents the search results in a list where each identified resource is associated with a uniform resource locator (URL) that specifies where the identified resource is available. The mechanism for retrieving the content is typically defined by the file pointed to by the URL (e.g., by the extension of the file, .docx, .html, .mp3, and the like). The content may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Depending on the type of resource pointed to by the URL, the appropriate program is launched. For example an image pointed to by the URL causes a computer to launch an image viewer, a document-type file causes an appropriate word processing document to launch, etc.
Applications such as e-mail and contact applications allow users to search for e-mails and contacts based on a query term. E-mails can be queried by sender, recipients, subject, and the like. Similarly, a local or global contact database can be searched for a particular contact or group and, in some cases, the same application that runs the search can execute a service such as make a call or prepare and e-mail to the contact or group.
What is needed is a communications resource tool that initiates queries of several remote sources based on a single query, associates the results and provides communications-related resources related to the results so as to allow associated communication system applications to be quickly and easily executed.